Word: hizballah
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...like Christopher Hitchens, who likes nothing more than giving an audience the finger. I just thought, it would take me all night to get anywhere with this. During the summer war in the Middle East there were white middle-class demonstrators waddling around under placards saying, we are all Hizballah now. They're suffering from what Paul Berman calls rationalist naivete. They think there must be historical reasons why this is happening, and this is all our fault. If someone's got dark skin, there's a very good chance that we f---ed them up in the past...
...past month--Rice has sketched out a vision of a "new alignment" of forces in the Middle East, in which a "stabilizing" group of U.S. allies, like Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, could unite to contain the "destabilizing" threat posed by Iran and radical groups like Hamas and Hizballah. "There is a recognition that things are really splitting," Rice says, "with extremists on one side and what I call responsible [governments]--because they're not all reformers--on the other side...
Rice's new restraint reflects a broader reworking of the democracy agenda that dominated U.S. foreign policy after 9/11. Two factors have contributed to that change. The first is the reality that free elections in places like Lebanon and the Palestinian territories have handed power to fundamentalist groups like Hizballah and Hamas that have little interest in pluralistic, secular governance. Whatever the ultimate benefits of implanting democracy in the Middle East, in the short run it's more likely to damage U.S. interests than serve them...
...There is nothing but two equally bad outcomes here. Hizballah takes over, creating an Iranian-allied Shi'a state, and Lebanon becomes a template for resurgent Shi'a throughout the Gulf. And certainly another war with Israel. Or, two, a civil war on par with Iraq's. In either case, fasten your seatbelts...
...past aside, I asked my Shi'a friend what's keeping Hizballah from immediately taking power. "The Sunni," he said. "If Hizballah moves too fast, the Sunni push the country into a full-fledged civil...